The Husk
by HotPinkCoffee
Summary: Even an empty shell has her opinions. Visser One and Eva, Eva's POV. Takes place during the series, spoilers up through #54. Rated for language and sexual content. Complete.
1. Swordplay

**Author's Note: **I just couldn't resist writing more Eva and Edriss. This is sort of a sequel to "Home for Dinner and Weekends", but you can probably read it without that. It'll be ten parts long and is already halfway written, so I'll probably be updating it fairly regularly, as quickly as I can successfully edit. Reviews and criticisms are always welcome and desired.

-/-

**The Husk**

-/-

**I: Swordplay**

-/-

-/-

{It's only fitting that they turn over Earth to Esplin Nine-Four-Six-Six. I left such solid and detailed plans only a fool could misinterpret them. They probably couldn't spare any strategists and decided to assign him to a guaranteed success.}

Edriss was conflicted and concerned, not that she wanted me to know that. In hours was going to meet with the future Visser Three, the inheritor of her little pet project, Earth. And Edriss, being the proud, ambitious creature that she was, wanted him to be competent yet not too competent, not enough to upstage her, not little enough to ruin all her progress. As always, she was trying to browbeat me into admitting how fantastically powerful the Yeerk race was and how she was completely secure in her promotion, but it's very difficult to hide your weaknesses from someone who spends every second with you.

{Oh, for God's sake, Yeerk,} I grumbled, {you're just as bad as humans are. You're worried he'll steal your spotlight and get to the Council before you. You being a blowhard about it is just what we humans call "overcompensation".}

{There's no reason for me to intimidated by Esplin Nine-Four-Double-Six. When I was stationed with him on the Taxxon Home World he was a mediocre leader at best,} Edriss told me, sounding less confident than her words. {The Council promoted Yangill Four-Four-Two and I ahead of Esplin for a very good reason.}

{Except that he has an Andalite host body and you're stuck in this weak little human body. You're not even in a fully capable Hork-Bajir body. Maybe you should have thought of that before you abducted me.}

{This body is suitable. I see no reason for me to leave such a pleasant host.} Lately Edriss was developing a sense of sarcasm, which was about a step beneath her usual outright derision.

{Don't let the Council hear you using vocal inflections, Edriss. They'll torture you for sympathy,} I jeered back. For the sake of my husband and son, I'd promised I wouldn't fight her for control, but that didn't mean I was going to stay silent when I had so many opportunities to taunt her.

Edriss ignored me and continued reviewing her files on Leera. Her current assignment would keep her in space, operating from a distance overlooking the Leeran home-world. She wouldn't be _in media res_, which was a change for her.

Instead, the actual direction of the Yeerk military forces on Leera was being delegated to Visser Eighteen. Edriss was being put in charge of weapons development, which was an insulting task for the future Visser One. It signaled to her that the Council, while recognizing that her capabilities and wiles made her well-qualified to be Visser One, didn't trust her yet. Edriss took this all to heart, of course, and for the last several weeks I'd been subject to her complaints about how underappreciated she was, and how she'd been the first to discover a Class Five species, and how no Yeerk was more dedicated than her, and so on.

"The future Visser Three would like to alert you that he has docked his Blade Ship and is prepared to meet with you to discuss the future of Earth." A Hork-Bajir with a red uniform approached – Esplin 9466's red honor guard coming to announce the Visser's arrival. Edriss stood, as is customary, and nonchalantly looked the guard up and down, then to her own gold-clad honor guards. She'd chosen the color because it signified human royalty, even though Yeerks had no such associations. I was sure Esplin had probably chosen red for its connotations of violence; red, I figured, was probably a universal symbol. Why wouldn't red blood be universal?

"Send him in," she said dismissively to the red guard. He left, though not with the usual deference of the other Controllers on this Empire Ship. An attempt at a snub? Maybe. Or maybe Esplin didn't think Edriss would be above him for very long, so it didn't matter if his guards were less than respectful.

I'd never seen an Andalite before. Edriss had, in her more bored moments, given me descriptions, but I had expected a smaller, nimbler creature. And Esplin's Andalite host body looked like it could be swift when the time called for it, but there was also a natural swagger in Esplin's step, the sort of confidence that came from not really needing the guards that surrounded him. And of course, Yeerk cruelty blazed from his eyes, the same that probably showed through mine.

I felt Edriss' disdain vibrating through my head.

{Visser Five.}

"Visser Seven." She enunciated every letter in the number.

{I've come to officially take your position as leader of the human infestation. I will be delivering the host species that you've been spending so much time with.} His voice dripped as much disdain as hers. {So much time.}

"Don't project your mistakes onto me, Visser Seven. If you'd only pressured the Council to follow up on your initial report on humans, perhaps Earth could have been your little conquest," Edriss said smugly. "But I suppose going out to shoot at Andalites was so much more prestigious."

Visser Seven tensed up at that. His deadly tail twitched a bit. In the blink of an eye it could decapitate me. {Prestigious enough that I'm recognized as a military leader, Edriss Five-Six-Two. Instead of only a tactician in weapons development.}

Edriss fought to keep from scowling. I laughed. {No smart retort to that, Edriss?}

She picked her haughtiness back up. "I suppose I should tell you I've reviewed your proposal for an open infestation. Apparently the Council has a lower opinion of your military tactics than you care to admit."

{And yet he's still a military leader and you're part of a think tank,} I taunted.

{Eva, you idiot,} Edriss snapped at me, {knowing him, if his plans are approved he'll burn your planet to a cinder. And your precious family, too.}

I stopped my jeering for a moment, internally pouting like a petulant child. It wasn't as if she'd given me much choice; the alternative was to graciously accept my fate and make life easy for her. It was an option I wasn't too inclined to take.

{That plan was a rough suggestion,} Visser Seven said dismissively.

"It showed a remarkable amount of disrespect for the seeds of subterfuge I've sown. Which have, thus far, been incredibly effective. We've taken hundreds of Human Controllers with a death toll that can be calculated by a Hork-Bajir."

{At an unacceptably laborious pace. The Council hoped I would be able to accelerate the invasion.}

"It's only an unacceptable pace to you because there's isn't an enemy body count for you to gloat over. I've seen the cost of your victories, Esplin."

{And how many good Yeerks have completed their final cycle without ever knowing a host? When we could have hosts for them all with this species? Your caution might have cost us years of progress,} he said, angrily. I could tell Edriss was pushing his buttons. I suspected it had been a long time since anyone off the Council had reacted to him with anything less than fear.

Edriss smiled, lacing my fingers together. The body language might have been foreign to Esplin, but the message couldn't have been: she wasn't intimidated, at least not outwardly.

"Esplin, you could at least be honest. You know I'll be credited if you continue with my plan and succeed. And I hope you're smart enough to know that your plan would leave us with a fraction of the hosts we could take. Really, the Council rejecting your proposal was the best thing that could have happened to you, so enough of this blustering. I hear honesty's a valued trait among Andalites," she said slyly, then added, "and their sympathizers."

The guards, gold and red, all bristled, as if expecting Visser Seven to lop my head off and start a brawl. But Visser Seven remained still, only allowing himself to glare with his two main eyes.

{An interesting accusation from someone who spent so many undocumented years on Earth,} he eventually said, slowly, and I felt Edriss run over with anger inside my head. {I can only hope that the information you gathered during your stay will be enough to deliver the species, now that I've taken on your role.}

Edriss kept that snake smile plastered on my face for the rest of their meeting, which mostly consisted of her explaining the reason The Sharing worked so well, despite some mishaps at the beginning. Infuriatingly enough for her, Esplin didn't really care. She used his disinterest as an excuse to take more than a few shots at his supposed love of Andalites, and he, of course, played right into it with indignant offense at each comment.

It was pathetic. It was like dogs posturing to each other over who would be the leader.

I stayed quiet, taking in every detail. I hoped someday to be free again and use everything I'd observed to take her down, but if I couldn't have that, I could at least have fodder to upset her. I didn't mind that it was spiteful and petty. Mocking her was the only satisfying thing I could still do, locked inside my body as I was.

After she dismissed him, I started back in on her. {Well, that was exciting. Here I was thinking human politics were dirty.}

She continued reviewing the files she'd earmarked for Leera. Details on new Yeerk technologies, mind-control technologies for non-sentient beings. Perhaps she could find some way to use them, some inventive plot that would deliver the Empire a powerful weapon. Or perhaps that wasn't such a good idea, since she risked being ghettoized as a weapons and stealth specialist, with none of the glory of a military leader.

I could feel a familiar melancholy in her. She'd officially turned over Earth to Visser Seven. Her brainchild, her conquest, the project she'd invested half a decade in, was being handed over to an inept braggadocio. I could still feel a trill of pride in her for her promotion, but being Visser One was less glorious than she'd imagined, and she had no soft feelings for the Leerans.

{You know, you and Esplin are a lot alike. You're both Yeerk traitors who care more about your host species than the Empire. He touched a nerve, didn't he?}

{Human, I'm completely capable of ignoring you.}

{But you don't. Sympathizer. Glory-hound. Dirty, self-servicing politician. Is this the best of the Empire? In-fighting and rivalries? Tell me, Edriss, do you hate him so much because he's stealing your show, or because he represents everything you hate about yourself? Sympathizer, sympathizer…}

{Was it sympathy when I stole your body from your family?} she asked cruelly, hoping to cow me, but I was enjoying myself too much.

{Esplin gets to go win the war on Earth and poor little Edriss goes to Leera with the frogs, doing weapons management like some schmuck. The Empire doesn't trust you, Yeerk. The Empire doesn't care about your subtlety and sophistication. No, they want strong, brutish, trustworthy Esplin to take your job. I guess brains only gets you so far, Edriss. You poor, poor evil thing.}

{My opportunities at Leera are a chance to prove my versatility. The Empire wishes to see breadth in their candidates for Council,} she said, but didn't believe it.

{You know what the best part is? He's not as smart as you, but he's stronger, Edriss. If his host got control back for even a second, he'd lop his own head off. Every time you lose control of me I can only attack myself with my weak human body, but an Andalite? He's got his host iron-clad. And you have to broker deals with me to not be a nuisance. Poor Edriss. Poor, poor Edriss.}

Edriss didn't answer, but her anger poured on me like rain.


	2. The Telepathic Secretary

**II: The Telepathic Secretary**

-/-

-/-

"Hey there, squirt, you school today?"

"Fingerpainting!" Marco smiled up at me, holding hands that dripped blue paint all over the garage floor. "Fingerpainting!"

Peter picked him up and set him on a bicycle. "Just no blue bike."

I took Peter's hand in mine and stared out at the glittering ocean. It opened up before us like a clamshell, a beautiful diorama framed by our garage walls. "Beautiful out. Look, see San Marcos? Get it, squirt, like Saint Marco?"

Marco frowned, letting his bicycle sink into water as blue as his hands. "Don't saints die?"

"Sometimes," I said, pulling Peter's ring finger off. I held it in my hand, put up to my lips and pretended to smoke it. He kissed me and, while I was distracted, took it back and put it in his pocket.

"Come here, sweetie, let wash your hands." I took Marco's hands in mine, his little boy hands covered in blue, and gently broke them off. He kept smiling up at me. I put his hands and Peter's finger in the sink and started to rinse all the paint off.

Peter tapped me on the shoulder. "Just got off doctor phone."

"Yeah?"

Peter looked deathly serious. "Hands don't grow back."

I looked at the tiny hands in the sink and screamed.

{Well, that's enough of _that_.}

I woke up. My eyes were still closed; Edriss hadn't decided to actually rouse my body yet, but my mind was alert again. Trapped in the blackness of paralysis. It didn't help the panic. My screams died between my mind and my lips.

After several minutes I remembered where I was, what was happening. A dream. {Edriss, did you do that?}

{Of course not. I don't have any interference with your dreams. I can only watch them.}

{You were watching that?}

She started to wake my body up, opening my eyes and shifting my muscles around. {Don't you understand by now that I watch everything? Your dreams are sometimes the only form of stimulation I have while your body rests. It's entertaining to try and trace the images to the source, sometimes.}

{Entertaining. I see.} It was always a strange sensation, to be so agitated and to feel none of the physical effects. My heart beat at the same rate it always did in the morning. My breathing was as leisurely as usual. Probably no change to my blood pressure. {There really isn't any privacy from you, is there?}

{None.}

She started to get my body up off the plush suede-lined bed. Most Yeerk infrastructure was utilitarian, but the quarters of Vissers were downright opulent. Surfaces were painted jade-green and gold, Edriss' favorite colors. Luxurious fabrics both mad-made and alien draped the bed, down pillows at the head. Small metal tubes that emitted pleasant scents lined the corners of the room. All the sensual pleasures Edriss could only enjoy while she was stealing my body, of course.

I didn't mind the goose-down, chadoo-lined comforter, to be honest.

Outside the window, the thin light of morning filtered in from beneath a hundred of feet of water. It didn't do much to light the room. Strange, how beautiful and dark Earth's ocean was. How forbidding, how inviting. I imagined the water pressing down on me, popping my ear drums, filling my lungs.

{As charming as your suicidal ideations are, human, we have matters to attend to,} Edriss said as she shifted my eyes away. I didn't protest as she started the morning routine. Enough exercise to keep me fit enough to look intimidating as a middle-aged woman could, a delicious but small breakfast, and supervising Operation 1530-562. While still bitter about being assigned to such a paltry assignment, Edriss was determined stay hands-on. If anything, it would show that she was a more dedicated leader than Visser Three. Or possibly one with more time on her hands.

Besides, success here could turn the tides on Leera. Victory was uncertain there, and a race of Leeran Controllers could undercut the invasion on Earth. Not that she didn't want Human Controllers, of course, but it would immediately minimize any victory Visser Three could manage. Politics, as usual.

Neither of us liked the Leerans, though. I was uncomfortable enough sharing my mind with one alien, and Edriss acted as if she had something to hide. She was completely fine invading the minds of others, naturally, but repulsed by the idea of some other creature catching a glimpse of hers.

Because of this, the Leerans were mostly assigned to administrative tasks that kept them far from her. Only one, her personal assistant, was allowed within psychic range, and he'd been outfitted with an exceptionally loyal Yeerk who'd promised to keep the Leeran's psychic abilities inactive. So far, Edriss had no reason to suspect him of lying, but she planned to kill him anyway. Now that she was Visser One, even Visser One on a insultingly low-level mission, loyal, terrified Yeerks were a dime a dozen.

The Leeran Controller was a Yeerk by the name of Aliss 987, a disturbingly human-sounding name. I tried to think of them by the host's name, which I knew to be Ga Gut Hum, even though I knew that was a silly ideation. It wasn't like anyone still thought of me as Eva Salazar.

{Good morning, Visser,} Ga Gut Hum said in his strange Leeran voice, a mixture of thought-speak and the guttural spoken monosyllables that make up the Leeran tongue.

"Aliss Nine-Eight-Seven, was there any unusual activity to report during the nightly operations?"

{No, Visser. Everything is going according to schedule. The hammerhead sharks from the sodium-karotide batch should be ready to progress to the next phase. Within two cycles they should be ready to test for infestation.}

"Good. And I trust you have reports on the recent attack that buffoon Visser Three waged on the Santa Barbra theme park?"

{Yes, honorable Visser. You should be pleased to know that the Visser's attempts to infest the human captain were a failure.}

Edriss smiled. By now, the rivalry between her and Esplin was no secret to anyone. If anything, her most successful underlings were the ones who catered to it. "Of course it was."

For what I figured were several hours, Edriss reviewed and memorized the data her scientists had provided her. Many of the sharks died between the third and fourth test phases. Some of the survivors were incapacitated. Edriss' many scientists had yet to figure out a process to create a suitable ear canal with a reasonable success rate.

But sharks between the second and third phases were suggesting that there was an alternative. After the second treatment and several cycles-worth of auditory training, the sharks could be controlled. It wasn't as exciting a development as turning them into host bodies, but with enough sharks to deliver to the Leera, they could have more Leeran host bodies. Edriss calculated that it would take about twenty cycles – two months – to complete, if she was able to bring in more technicians and handlers from the shore.

"Aliss Nine-Eight-Seven," she called, "before I promise the Council water soldiers, remind them that engineering new host bodies is a science no one has really succeeded at. Manage their expectations. I want them to see controllable sharks as a victory, not as a project completed below their expectations."

Ga Gut Hum waddled in as best an amphibian can, with a clipboard. It was a comical scene. He sagged and struggled to remain standing, a wet yellow sack of dehydrated flesh. Leerans often have difficulty holding up their own weight on land. {Yes, Visser.}

"I don't want you to announce our plans to the Council until we run a few more tests and decide infestation is impossible. It's a slim chance, but delivering another host species along with Leera would put me on the Council in sixty cycles. But manage their expectations. If the shark soldiers are seen as a success, I could be fast-tracked to at least an Inspector. And you would, of course, be rewarded for your loyalty and charisma."

An ugly smile crept over his face. Typical Yeerk ambition. {Yes, honorable Visser. Also, I believe I have located four technicians to arrive tomorrow-}

"Did I ask you to interrupt?"

Ga Gut Hum closed his mouth instantly. I knew Edriss was just throwing her weight around to remind him that she had no soft feelings for him, but Ga Gut Hum probably thought he was walking on eggshells. What the good Visser giveth, and all that.

"Send the technicians. Oh, and before you link to the Council, I'd like to observe the sharks for another cycle. Tell the submarine crew that we'll be taking a tour of the current facilities, but don't alert the workers. I'd like to observe them surreptitiously."

With a slight waggle of his middle tentacles, the Leeran equivalent of a nod, Ga Gut Hum left to do her bidding.

About an hour later, we were on the submarine. It was always unsettling, given that the whole thing looked like it was made of glass, and we were now fifty feet under the water. Enough afternoon sunlight came through to light the whole submarine up aquatic blue.

Edriss was watching, making occasional comments for Ga Gut Hum to write down. Mostly she was enjoying the beauty of the ocean, but I was the only one who knew that. She didn't want anyone to know that she was worried about the Council's response to her inability to make the sharks infestation-worthy, nor that the vastness of the sea eased her anxiety. "Aliss Nine-Eight-Seven, I'd like you to keep an eye out for any trace of rebellion. Observe body language. I've heard rumor that Visser Three is attempting to gain information on this location from disloyal followers."

{Paranoid, much?} I asked. She didn't pay me any attention.

{I already know which Yeerks are loyal, Visser. I have only exempted you from my host's telepathy,} Ga Gut Hum said nervously.

Edriss glared for a second, then softened with a small smile. Using telepathy around other Yeerks had been forbidden by the Council since the first Leeran was infested, and Edriss felt a bit of kinship for clever rule-breakers. "I wasn't aware that Leerans could exempt specific people from their telepathy."

{The Council is not aware either,} he said, slightly more emboldened.

"And you didn't find it prudent to tell me which Yeerks are disloyal?"

{I haven't noticed any disloyalty, Visser. Only distrust. Rumors have been spreading that you're attempting to save the humans from their fate as hosts by replacing them with sharks and Leerans.}

Edriss laughed, a sound that was much crueler than the laughter I'd made in my past life. "Another one of Visser Three's attempts at libel."

{Slander is spoken. In print, it's libel. You mean slander,} I said, but she continued to ignore me.

Edriss suddenly became very serious. "Yeerks should be proud, Aliss. We should not fear other species. We should not fear admiring other races. If we understand Leerans, and Hork-Bajir, and yes, humans, we can take the best elements of their cultures and make our Empire stronger. We can find their weaknesses and enslave them more quickly. The Council was established before first contact was made with the Andalites. They don't understand the benefits of curiosity."

She seemed to have lost Ga Gut Hum, but kept talking anyway, her voice getting louder and louder. It sounded like she was giving a motivational speech to herself, in a strange way. The crew around us tried very hard to look as if they weren't eavesdropping. "Only weak and foolish Yeerks would confuse curiosity with empathy. Only Yeerks who have no pride in their own species would choose to become our chattel. A Yeerk with pride acknowledges the power of understanding another race and uses it to make our Empire stronger. A proud Yeerk uses knowledge to _enslave_."

The crew was silent.

"Aliss Nine-Eight-Seven of the Hett Simplat pool," she finally said, her tranquil mood spoiled by hearsay, "put that ridiculous host body to use and sing us a pride song."

Without a word of protest, Ga Gut Hum started making a deep, guttural noise in the base of his throat. A warm, proud feeling started to creep across my brain Leeran music is unlike any music humans know of. It consists of a feedback loop, using telepathy to dig out the desired emotion from the listener and then amplify it and project it back into the listener's mind. The more powerful the initial emotion, the more powerful the song.

"Don't you feel any pride in your species?" Edriss yelled at her crew. "Is this all you'll give Aliss Nine-Eight-Seven to work with?"

Ga Gut Hum stopped for a moment, and paused to look out into the ocean.

"What?" she demanded.

Ga Gut Hum shrugged and pointed a tentacle towards the surface. Edriss stood up and turned around. I saw six sleek black shapes against the bright sky.

"It's only dolphins," Edriss said, and ordered her crew back to work.


	3. Under

**III: Under**

-/-

-/-

Different compounds of chemicals for the sharks gave different results. One formula might be quicker to take, but produce more variation in shark intelligence, or have a lower survival rate. If she had a few more months, Edriss' staff might be able to find a compound stable enough to make infestation a possibility. On the other hand, it could be a wild goose chase, and the Council was notoriously impatient.

Of course, it was possible Edriss could take a gamble and hope the Council was as eager as she was to discredit Visser Three. Rendering his mission moot by delivering new hosts would be a crippling blow to his chances at a further promotion. The Council had reasons to resent him, as he'd refused to turn over his Andalite host body for their purposes, even though some of the Council members were still left in inferior Hork-Bajir and Taxxon bodies. And there was always the problem of the so-called Andalite bandits, who somehow had evaded capture despite being outnumbered and stranded in a foreign world.

Though the Andalite bandits certainly made an excellent excuse for the Visser's failures. Perhaps that was why he hadn't been all that upset when Edriss had released them from the Pool Ship. And he'd been remarkably quick to abandon his deforestation plan.

{You do realize that you're helping me by observing everything, don't you?} Edriss interrupted my contemplation.

{Hmm?}

{I can access everything you notice. Sometimes you notice things I might miss. Having you paying attention is like having the thoughts of two minds at once.}

{I didn't know Yeerks admitted that they overlooked things,} I told her.

{We're powerful, Eva. But we aren't hubristic.}

My peals of laughter echoed through my crowded head. {That's rich.}

{Hubris is pride that leads to your downfall. We've had setbacks, but been remarkably successful thus far, through nothing but our own wits and resourcefulness. I don't anticipate that will change.}

{Is that what you think? It'll make so much more satisfying when I use all this information to kill you, when I'm free,} I said with just a bit of false bravado.

{Is that what you think?} She mimicked me. {Eva, don't you realize that no matter what happens, you'll never be free? Even in the incredibly unlikely scenario where I die and you don't, you'll always be part of this Empire. They'll shuttle your body around until you outlive your usefulness.}

{I'll be free in death,} I said defiantly.

{But that's not your ideal situation, is it? Your idea of freedom is returning to your normal life with your silly family and job. And if that were to happen – which is, again, highly unlikely – do you just imagine that all this time with me will be forgotten? How many motions will you make and second-guess your own volition? How lonely will you be in your head with no one to talk to? How will you ever readjust to human society when your idea of success is ripping me out of your head and stomping me to pieces, you violent little creature?}

{You're over-estimating how much you matter to me, Edriss. I can pretty much guarantee you I'll never miss you when you're dead.}

But Edriss seemed pretty confident. {You know, occasionally a host escapes, or remains uninfested for quite some time. Contrary to your delusions, it doesn't make them happy.}

{Well,} I said, before sinking back into myself and ignoring her, {I'm not them, and I can't think of anything that would make me happier than pouring salt all over you.}

Edriss kept talking to me, but I was less entertaining to her when I was unresponsive, and eventually she gave up and went back to focusing on her work. It was an incredibly slow morning, mostly spent waiting on results from new trials to come in and for the new technicians to show up.

After some indeterminate length of time, the alarm went off. Edriss looked up at the blinking red light, shrugged and waited for Ga Gut Hum. The complex was guarded by a variety of security systems that had a tendency to go off for false alarms every cycle or so.

Ga Gut Hum didn't enter for too much time for it to be a false alarm. Edriss drummed her fingers on the desk, maintaining a cool but impatient composure in spite of being alone. My curiosity was also piqued.

{Well,} she said, {it could be that we finally have the Andalite bandits paying us a visit. Or it could be that that incompetent fool of a Visser is deigning to see us.}

Ga Gut Hum finally rushed in, panting with the exertion of hurrying in this dry environment. {Honorable Visser, three Andalite bandits have infiltrated the stage three trial rooms. The emergency Hork-Bajir guards have been deployed to attack them and the scientists have been relocated out of harm's way to the stage one trial rooms.}

Edriss stood up behind the deck. "When Visser Three presented me with his captured bandits, there were six."

{I have already sent words to the Taxxon dispatches to begin searching for the other three, and arranged for the integrated sharks to patrol the outside borders in case they haven't entered yet.}

Edriss smiled, but the muscles around my eyes didn't move. "I am pleased with your quick thinking, Aliss Nine-Eight-Seven. Now go, meet me at the stage three trial rooms. Deploy as many Hork-Bajir guards as necessary, and authorize the scientists to arm themselves with Dracon weapons."

{Consider it accomplished, Visser.} Ga Gut Hum smiled grotesquely with pride before running out, huffing and stumbling as he went.

Edriss quickly punched some codes into the computer system, configuring the Gleet Biofilters in the stage one trial rooms to identity-specific settings rather than species-specific. Most important of all was to protect her scientists and the information they possessed. If they survived, even if the Andalites killed all the subject sharks and destroyed the equipment, the experiment could be replicated.

The door handle turned slightly. "Come in," Edriss hissed, impatient. After several seconds of silence, she continued with the usual Yeerk posturing, expecting Ga Gut Hum to be behind the door with some confession of ineptitude. "I said come in. Never make me give an order twice. You won't live to hear me give it a third time."

And then he entered the room.

My mind left me. My mind, the only piece of me I still had control of, was ripped from me. I wailed and shrieked inside the body that was now Edriss', the body she used to turn impassive eyes to the body of my son.

Marco, his body at least, nearly fourteen years old, stood across from me. His Yeerk was struggling to control him, I could tell. I didn't want to imagine what my little boy was thinking, what tide of happiness that I was alive was conflicting with anguish at being a slave.

Just another technician for Edriss to put to work. Edriss admonished his Yeerk for not having complete control, gloating at how she was managing me so well. She callously ordered him to his station. She did not address me. There was nothing to address.

My kid, my beloved child, was a slave. Peter probably was too. I wept and screamed, nearly oblivious to Edriss moving my body around, meeting Ga Gut Hum at the trial room and seeing the bandits. No images would stay in my brain, no new information sticking. Events swirled around and I barely noticed, couldn't make sense of any of it, didn't care, couldn't follow, couldn't, wouldn't, wouldn't take.

Visser Three attacked. Ga Gut Hum was knocked unconscious by a gorilla. A bear and an Andalite chased Edriss back into her office.

I didn't care. Everything I'd had left had been quashed in that office. A battle was raging around me, wounds were accumulating on my body, alien corpses were littering the hallways, and I didn't care. Not my war. Not my species. We were victims in this hellish invasion, nothing but warm bodies. Not my life anymore. Edriss fought for her survival, not even momentarily upset by my son's infestation. Pleased, if anything. Maybe annoyed that my weeping was distracting her, if it was. I didn't think about it. I didn't think about anything.

I realized water was spattering my face. Somehow, I'd been injured. Somehow I was on the floor. Blood dribbled from my mouth, mingling with spit and salt water on my chin. My hair had come down from its practical up-do and was plastered across my vision. A Dracon beam was smooth and cold in my hand.

I could fight her, try for an instant to take control of the weapon and fire a shot into my own body – I had the energy, I had the fury, I could try. But instead, I surrendered to her and let her will wash me away from myself.

Edriss fired a shot of her Dracon beam and missed.

The bear raised a hubcap-sized paw to us. I barely had time to issue what I prayed were my last words to Edriss: {I hope this kills us.}


	4. A Flower in the Desert

**IV: A Flower in the Desert**

-/-

-/-

{Eva, are you there?}

I didn't know where else she thought I'd be, given that she was wrapped around my brain, but I didn't respond to her. I'd lain completely fallow for tens of cycles so far – I'd long since stopped keeping track of time in days and weeks – and didn't feel any urge to change that. There wasn't any point to it anyway.

{Human, how long are you going to keep this up? You know I don't enjoy spending my time with a silent host.}

To my surprise, this annoyed Edriss. And more than that, it annoyed her that her frustration didn't please me. Nothing did. In a way, I was steadfastly determined not to take joy from anything, because it would be trivial and girlish and completely delusional to find happiness in my wretched joke of a life.

{Human, you have no idea how lucky you are to have me as your ruler. I could be one of those sadistic Yeerks, or a callous one who pretends you don't exist. Aren't you happy to have a ruler who wants to learn? Who's willing to tell you about her people?}

I knew that she could just read my thoughts, but that had bored her even when I was more active. Now, I was, apparently, just intolerable. A "vacuous swamp of self-pity", in her words. I didn't care. Apathy was, oddly enough, my lifeline to consciousness.

{Eva, don't you want to talk about politics?}

Sometimes Edriss raged at me about it, sometimes she threatened, but really, she didn't have anything left to take from me. My son, probably my husband, were slaves. My planet was being taken over by this alien cancer. My own free will was so limited it might as well have been a figment of my imagination.

On her kinder days she presented me with artwork, poetry, music, all the bounty from the vast storehouse of human culture she was accumulating on the Pool Ship. Edriss was a collector, in her own strange way; many Yeerks were, though the Council tried to forbid it. She'd come to appreciate many human works over the years, from Iago's cleverness in Shakespeare's _Othello_ to the brazen defiance of _Liberty Leading the People_. And she'd kept some of the pieces I'd enjoyed in my former life – the Borges, the Tchaikovsky, the Faulkner, the Van Gogh, the Dylan – and she used them to try and coax some reaction out of me. Maybe she just wanted to see a flicker of appreciation, instead of apathy. I gave her nothing, possibly because I had nothing to give.

On her crueler days she'd go through my memories and find all the things that had enraged me as a free person. She'd rifle through my former insecurities and spew hatred at me, racism and sexism and grave insults about my character and my family, hoping to pick at my pride and push my buttons enough for me to protest. She'd rattle off a litany of epithets for me, Eva the Whore, the Wetback, the Failure, the Weakling, Eva the Bitch, Eva Who Doesn't Exist, Eva the Empty, Broken, Soulless Husk. Unfortunately for her, one of the few positive aspects about being one of the living dead was that I had no buttons left to push.

{Human, I could take a new host, one who doesn't spend all her time feeling sorry for herself.}

{Eva, you pathetic defeatist, are you trying to tell me that you've based your entire self-worth on your sad little excuse for a family and career? You were nothing before I took you. Working for candidates you didn't agree with, making dinner every night like some cheap hired help – isn't that what you never wanted to be? Just another immigrant in the kitchen? Just another stupid whore playing dress up with the American Dream? And you were, until I helped you. I made you, Eva. You're learning things beyond your species' imagination and you're too small-minded to think about anything but the shallow life you had.}

{Eva, I'm getting very tired of this.}

Sometime between eighty cycles and ninety cycles – I lost count – she took us to the technological Empire census, a database-like system that had information on every known Yeerk, dead or alive, in the Empire. Memory dumps, current stations, feeding schedules, birth pool, identifications – and all the data on human hosts. A mass violation of privacy, from a species that knew nothing of the word.

It wasn't unusual for Edriss to use information from the census, but it was unusual for her to access it herself. Normally, her entourage would be working the computer systems for her; a Visser, even one with a temporary demotion, had more important duties to attend to, after all, and even the lowliest of Yeerks, fresh in their first host-body, could figure out how to tease information from the census. Even more unusual was using the system to search for human host bodies, since most Yeerks considered these fairly interchangeable. I would have been mildly curious why had I not been so preoccupied with not caring.

She used my fingers to spell out the only names that could rouse me. Marco Samuel Laroche. Peter Michael Laroche.

{Why?} I asked her, speaking to her for the first time in what must have been months.

{If you're going to sit around moping about your family, I might as well bring them near you and maybe that will bring you to your senses. I'm going to request my personal assistants use their bodies. That will make you happy again, won't it?}

In my head, I laughed at her, finally giving in and feeling something. {You're an idiot, Yeerk. You think watching my family be slaves to your filthy kind is going to make me happy? And you claim to know humans! You idiot. Why don't you just kill me now and get it over with, if I bother you this much?}

{Enough of your self-pity, you spoiled, selfish, close-minded _human_!} Edriss raged, in a tone I'd never heard her direct at me, even at her most frustrated. {Do you think it makes you noble to suffer? You think martyrdom is admirable? Do you really think your life is so, so terrible that death would be merciful? You're sickening. You should be sickened with yourself.}

{Yes,} I stated evenly. {I do think death would be merciful.}

For a long time she was silent, but I could feel her rage boiling in my head. Finally, she spoke again, this time measured and quiet. {You humans have no idea how lucky you are. You have everything, and you discard it like garbage. You tell me now that you would rather die than go on living when you have what my species has waged wars for. You have eyes that see brilliant colors and depth and light and shade. You have ears that can hear music. You have bodies that can walk and run and jump and enjoy sex and swim and kiss and dance. And you don't appreciate any of it. You think it's worth less than whatever melancholy you're afflicted with today.}

I didn't have anything to say to that. I wanted to tell her that some good my body did when I didn't have an ounce of control over it, but her vitriol stunned me.

{It is a privilege to be human,} she said. {You have minds capable not only of rational thought, but philosophy. Art. Design. Love. Complex relationships. Cognitive dissonance. You have strong, capable bodies and good senses, and better yet, the brains to appreciate those senses. There are Yeerks out there who would lay down their lives for a day of what you're so willing to discount.}

I felt she was holding something back from me, because I could feel some kind of sadness from her. Not guilt, certainly not guilt; she always felt perfectly entitled to exploit the human race. I wondered if maybe knowledge was traumatic to Yeerks, if by stepping outside Plato's cave and suddenly having senses and being mobile made all their host-less experiences unbearable. Maybe she was recounting all the cycles of her life that she'd spent blind and ignorant.

{There are many humans who would lay down their lives for freedom. And have done so,} I told her.

{I know. It's both admirable and baffling. Your commitment to your ideals makes you fearsome, awe-inspiring opponents, but it's an insult to everything I've worked for to say that our conquest is of nothing.}

I didn't feel all that bad about insulting her. {You took what I had from me, Edriss. First you took my volition, then you took my career and my family, and now your kind have taken the tiny hope I had that my family was happy and safe. It's an insult to tell me to be happy when I've lost...nearly…everything. So you could get a promotion.}

{You have no idea what _I've_ sacrificed for this promotion.}

I would have frowned and rolled my eyes, but as usual, had no control. And yet, I felt different than I had for months now. Peevish and bitter, instead of broken. I wondered if it would last, or if I wanted it to.

{Well, we don't know if your husband is still happy and safe, at least.} She punched the names into the search function.

I didn't want her feeding the little seedling of hope in me. It would only make it that much harder when I eventually saw him, too, under Yeerk control. But the census didn't show anything. There was a Peter Laroche listed, but his middle name was different and he lived in San Francisco.

Not my Peter, which was believable and a relief. So my husband was free, for now at least. But more surprising was that Marco's name wasn't anywhere on the list. He and Peter both appeared as relations to my host body, but not as host bodies on their own.

{That's not…that's not correct.} Edriss typed in Salazar, in case Marco was entered under my name, tried misspellings of both surnames, searched by address, by birth date. Nothing. {The census is methodically maintained. Every Yeerk and host body is registered. They have to be, to schedule feeding times.}

{Would his name show up if he was killed during the Royan Island Project?} I asked, fearing the worst.

{Yes. The census would simply mark him as deceased,} Edriss said, allaying my fears. She searched again. Nothing. Again. Still nothing. {We saw him. He was at Royan. He was a Controller. By all rights he should be in the census.}

In a remarkably human gesture, she smacked the screen of the computer-deck, as if that would change the data in front of her.

{I'll report to the technological services that the census personnel need to be disposed of and replaced with more diligent workers,} she said, though I could feel uncertainty in her.

And with that, the little seedling of hope that had lain dormant for so long started to bloom.


	5. Children with Men's Voices

**V: Children with Men's Voices**

-/-

-/-

Between my conviction that Edriss was barreling straight into a trap and Edriss' belief that she was diving headfirst into an opportunity for a promotion, we were both fairly optimistic when she was driving around with the Andalite bandits in her car.

"Why don't we merely take a helicopter to this Hork-Bajir colony?" Edriss asked, fishing for more information. Just because she was hopeful about the situation didn't mean that she was trusting.

For the most part, I stayed silent. I had only recently returned to taunting and jeering Edriss, and even then less than I had in the past. It had been a relief to know that Marco and Peter weren't infested, unless something had happened in the last hundred cycles, but some way or another my son was wrapped up in this hellish war, and there was really no way for that to be comforting.

But more importantly than that, I wanted to be able to pick up on every detail and nuance of the Andalite bandits, so that in the event that I was freed, I'd be able to contact them and tell them every single thing I'd noticed while I was Edriss' puppet. It was a dangerous thing to do, I knew, because Edriss could see anything I pieced together, but I was trying only to observe, not analyze. Hopefully, that would be enough but not too much.

As Edriss drove, the Andalites espoused their usual predictable reasoning behind wanting Edriss and not Esplin in command of Earth, and I tried not to take offense at their insistence that my body was "unstable" and easy to kill. Hard to contest that against a morph-capable alien with a bladed tail.

{In direct battle you will be easier to kill than Visser Three. Humans, Controllers or not, die easily.}

"And yet," Edriss murmured, and I could feel her weighing something in her mind, searching her own memories and my own. "And yet, the casualty reports from Earth are always weighted heavily toward Hork-Bajir and Taxxons. In fact…I am trying to recall when I have ever seen a report listing a Human Controller casualty."

{Visser Three's temporary possession of that technological crystal,} I muttered at her, {and of course, Royan Island, your own little pet project, weapons developer.}

{I know that,} Edriss shot back, {but that doesn't mean that I can't try to get a reaction out of the Andalite scum. You hear how they speak about humans. It would be entertaining to tempt their arrogance with a suggestion that they aren't all Andalites are made out to be.}

And yet, the car was silent. Surprise registered for both of us.

{You don't think…?} I asked her, incredulous, then realizing that any thought I put into it was as good as hers, started yelling at her, grasping at any stray insult I could think of as I tried to distract her. If it were true, if the Andalite bandits were humans, if they were humans stupid enough to let that on to Edriss, she might abandon her deal with them and not walk into a situation Visser Three might control. She might not commit us to some suicidal gambit for power. I couldn't let her think it through that far.

{You idiotic piece of slime, there's no possible way for humans to have the morphing technology. You're just chasing after ghosts. You like us humans so much that you want to believe we're capable of stymieing Visser Three, but that's just because you're a low-life sympathizer, ashamed of your own form. The Council will starve you out of me, Edriss, slug, useless blind slug, sympathizing, jealous little slug.}

{Enough, Eva,} Edriss snapped, though exteriorly a satisfied smile spread over my lips. {Do you honestly think I haven't considered the possibility of a trap? Do you think I'm so weak-minded as to be distracted by your pathetic taunts?}

I lapsed back into silence, trying unsuccessfully to fill my mind with anything other than the thought of the Andalite bandits not actually being Andalite bandits.

Edriss continued. {There must be humans among them, or at least in allegiance with them. Foolish of us to not have considered it. They must have had contact with humans or they wouldn't have survived and gone undetected as long as they have.}

{There's at least one Andalite. We've seen him with my own eyes twice now.}

{It could be a human in morph, though I find that unlikely. They're probably mostly Andalites, to have survived as long as they have, but there must be humans among them doing more than advising and sheltering. Eva,} she mused, switching to a wheedling tone, {perhaps that's where your precious Marco is now.}

I said nothing, but my thoughts raced with shame. How had I not considered that?

Edriss laughed at me. {Don't be silly, Eva. Your trusting, naïve little brat? He was doubtlessly an unauthorized host that didn't live long enough to be registered by the system. It happens, sometimes. No need to give yourself any false hope.}

Having successfully shut me down for the moment, she turned her attention back to driving, smugly considering all the ways she could use this information to humiliate Visser Three and reveling in the awkward silence of the bandits in the car. I found myself unable to stop thinking about the creatures, alien or not, who were crouched somewhere in the vehicle.

We arrived at the Visitor's Center only slightly ahead of Visser Three's forces, late enough that Edriss was nervous and hostile. The incident at the shop had shaken her, and no intuiting the bandits' secrets could quite occlude her fear of a quick, Dracon-provided death should she lose control of the situation. It would still be a while before we reached the colony of free Hork-Bajir.

The hike was difficult, to say the least. I would have never pushed myself to the pace Edriss kept. She could feel my pain, but only a fraction of it – I was taking the full brunt of the burning lungs, the blistering feet, the scraped palms, the quaking legs demanding 'stop, stop'. Edriss registered the exertion but pushed through it, doing a fair job at having my body keep up with the Hork-Bajir guide.

At the very least, it was giving me something to think about besides the bandits, whatever they were, whoever they were.

{They're trying to tire you out, Edriss, so they can kill you when they reach the top,} I said. I was allowing myself a little jeering since she seemed dead-set on continuing anyway. {But I suppose you already thought of that, didn't you? I'm sure you've already considered all the ways they're going to kill you and set me free.}

{You know, human, you may find it unusual, but I do prefer your snide remarks to your silence. Especially when my only other companionship is a Hork-Bajir.}

{Well, I'm so incredibly happy I could cheer you up, Edriss. You might as well die happy, right?}

Edriss hauled my body up the final cliff face and let me lie down, staring upwards. Even her sheer force of will couldn't rouse my exhausted legs to hold me up, so we lay. Her ships were up there, though shielded. The fluffy clouds and blue sky we saw was only a mirage, a façade for death and weaponry.

After I was no longer gasping for breath, we stood. The view from the cliff was stunning. If it really was a last view for me – if my prayers were answered and Edriss and I were both about to die – it was a satisfactory one.

{Beautiful,} Edriss muttered to herself, before turning and facing the mountain goat in front of us. "Andalite?"

{No, Yeerk, there's just a friendly goat up here,} I sneered.

As if reading my mind, the goat answered {of course.}

"Well, Andalite or human, whatever you are behind that morph," I felt she added that part specifically for me, "you'd better know one thing: my loyal forces fill the sky! Betray me and you'll be blasted apart!"

{We have a deal. Visser Three will join us soon. He will be alone or nearly alone.}

Neither Edriss nor I believed that second part even for an instant, but Edriss was confident that her ships and sensors would be enough to prevent anything too dangerous to us. "The Hork-Bajir colony. I don't see any colony."

The goat turned its head slightly, then said {not to get all Prince of Egypt on you, but…behold!}

{Prince of Egypt?} Edriss and I both thought at once, but at that moment the ground before us shimmered and vanished, replaced by a steep drop and a valley of free, happy Hork-Bajir. The very sight of it wiped any semblance of skepticism from us as we were overcome with emotion: me with wonder and sadness at the thought that this place existed and would soon be destroyed, and Edriss with sick anticipation and glee. The Hork-Bajir guides behind us said something, but neither of us were paying attention, transfixed by the sight of free, oblivious Hork-Bajir.

{Okay, we fulfilled our end of the bargain. Now it's up to Visser Three,} the goat muttered, and suddenly all the skepticism came rushing back. I felt Edriss flipping through memories, flipping through sounds I'd heard, voices in my memory.

"I know you," she said, with a disarming smile. "I know you, don't I?"

{I am an Andalite warrior. That's all you need to know.}

It was the feeblest attempt at an excuse I'd heard in a long time. Neither Edriss nor I believed it, and I was torn between curiosity and wanting to hide whatever conclusion I reached from her.

"No. Andalites don't make jokes, let alone human pop culture references. No, you're a human, and someone I used to know. Long ago, maybe. But someone I knew," she said to him, and then to me {I can't match the voice to any of your memories, but I'm certain we know this human.}

{I am too,} I answered, sad and surprised, unable to keep anything from her.

The goat said nothing.

{We'll piece it together,} she said to me, putting special emphasis on "we". Not letting me forget that I was aiding her every step of the way, even when I tried to sabotage her.

But right as she started to delve into my memories again, Visser Three appeared and we were both too distracted to do anything but react to him and the many soldiers he'd brought. Edriss and I were both taken aback – we hadn't anticipated he'd be in morph, nor that he'd bring so much backup.

{Well, well, well,} he gloated, {what's this? Visser One perched on the edge of a free Hork-Bajir colony? Chatting amiably with two free Hork-Bajir and, unless I miss my guess, an Andalite?}

To her credit, my body showed no physical stress response. She kept her unease, her utter panic at the situation taking a turn for the worse, completely internal.

Rather than cower, she turned her arrogant words on Esplin. Between the goading Edriss and Esplin did – traitor, incompetent, the usual nauseatingly pathetic song and dance – they were calling down ships to attack each other. Edriss was fully planning on switching the call of attack to the Hork-Bajir the instant before it would be too far gone to look like an accident. I had no doubts that Esplin was as well.

What neither of us expected was that he'd have the audacity to rush and attack us without pretense. As he lunged forward, Edriss pulled a Dracon beam from her bag, but much too late to stop Esplin's momentum. His claw slammed into my shoulder as the Dracon beam shot a superficial hole in him.

The pain caught both of us off-guard – Edriss fell, bleeding and screaming, to the rock floor, and I let out a howl of agony in our head. His claw hadn't punctured as deep as it could have, but it must have been barbed; it had ripped a messy hole down to my collarbone. Blood spilled onto my shirt.

The goat that wasn't really a goat lunged at Visser Three with a very public, very loud cry. Two minds worth of confusion swirled in my head, but everything was happening too quickly for either of us to piece together whom our strange protector and trickster was. The earth beneath us was splitting, Dracon shots going wild, Edriss and Esplin screaming at each other and at their fleets.

Thinking quickly, Edriss retrieved her communicator and demanded to be picked up and removed from the action, but we were isolated on one side of the now-split cliff. Isolated with the goat. With whomever it was who was simultaneously willing to set us up to die and try to defend us.

Edriss moved my eyes to stare at it, face it and try to decide if it was friend or foe. But years of her own paranoia pushed her to raise her weapon at it, rather than grant it temporary trust.

The goat said {I love you.}

{Peter?}

{No.} Edriss reached the conclusion first. Her voice was hollow with disbelief. {No.} And out loud, "The boy! It's the boy!"

Marco lunged for us, and I had never been filled with so much relief and such crushing despair all at once. Nor so much terror as when a tiger appeared over the edge of the cliff and pinned him. Or when Edriss raised her weapon to murder my son with my very own hand.

{No! Edriss, don't! Please! Please don't kill him! No!} I wailed at her, impotent, helpless, utterly helpless to watch her slaughter my child.

I would have gratefully lived a hundred years of torture if it had meant I could have had control over my body at that point, enough to toss aside the weapon, enough to smile and run over to my son and embrace him, enough to just not _shoot_ him. But Edriss had anticipated my bid for control, and repressed me easily. She leveled the weapon at him, followed his tumbling body until she could be sure she could kill him and the tiger both in one shot, and completely dispassionately, twitched her trigger finger.

I didn't know if what happened next was divine intervention, fate, or sheer luck. Perhaps God was answering my silent prayer to save my son, if God is capable of hearing unvoiced invocations from helpless slaves. Perhaps Edriss had a moment of sympathy and paused for just a half-second too long. But she never pulled the trigger.

A black and white bird nearly slashed our eyes out instead, and while Edriss reeling with the pain, while I was reeling with the knowledge that Marco was not only free but a warrior, somehow one of my feet left the cliff ledge. Gravity finished what it had started, and I caught a last glimpse of the goat that was no Andalite, the goat that was a human, that was my sweet and clever son, before I plummeted from the edge of the cliff.

Rather than falling the entire way down the cliff face, I hit a ledge first, sending a lit fuse of pain up my spine to burst in my brain. I must have hit my head on something after that, because time skipped forward, and the next thing I was aware of, I was blind and incapacitated in a bed, bandaged and groggy.

{Edriss?} I asked in the blackness.

{Your son tried to kill you,} she said, and I felt myself slip into an uncomprehending, semi-conscious state.

I was incommunicable for a long while, probably days, on some type of alien anesthetic, drifting in and out of awareness. Edriss spoke to me, but I was beyond understanding words. Eventually either she was silent or I was incapable of hearing her, but I could vaguely understand that she was repeating the memory of the encounter with Marco over and over again. I could feel her being removed for feedings and reinfesting me, but had neither energy nor capability to even make a superficial attempt at fighting her off. She must have been bored, stuck perpetually awake in an amaurotic, bound body, so she started sorting through every memory I had of my son.

Sometimes, when the anesthetic wore off and the pain returned, so did my lucidity. {Edriss? Why can't I see?}

{The morphed bird attacked your eyes, human. They're damaged, but will heal with time. The bandages will be removed soon,} Edriss said clinically, detachedly.

{Why am I still being kept alive? As a host body? Surely I'm so damaged I'm useless to you, especially to a Visser.}

Edriss was quiet for a while, or possibly I slipped into unconsciousness and re-awoke to her. {I requested that you be kept alive unless your body is completely crippled. I didn't want to give you the satisfaction of dying. You still have many uses to me, more now that I know what your son is. His attempt on your life made you more than merely an ordinary host body.}

{Oh. Thank you.}

Edriss sounded surprised. {Changing your mind about freedom in death, human?}

{No. I just don't want my son responsible for my death. I don't want to burden him with that.}

Edriss' voice was heavy with disdain. {Self-sacrificing Eva, is that it? You'll give more years of your life for the ungrateful child who just tried to kill you. Your son attempted matricide, Eva.}

{No,} I said, with deep certainty, certainty she couldn't shake, even as I was drifting back into a dream-state, {he tried to kill you, because he knows what you are. I was just in the way.}

The next time I woke, Edriss, fresh from a feeding and with new information from her pool-mates, told me {the other reason I didn't forfeit your body was because the Council forbid me to take another host until the trial is complete. I'm to be tried for a variety of crimes.}

I might have smiled, were I capable. {Took them long enough to catch you at it, didn't it? Playing footsie with Andalite bandits, killing henchmen, messing up Royan Island like you did? And sympathizing, of course. I wondered when they'd finally get you for that. When does the trial start?}

{As soon as this body is well enough to stand in court. No treatment beyond what is absolutely necessary to ensure your survival and basic mobility. And that incompetent Visser Three will probably add a few injuries of his own while we're in his captivity,} she said darkly. {Should I be proven guilty we'll both die painfully.}

{Sounds lovely,} I said dryly. {You deserve it, you know.}

{Everything I've done has been in service of the Empire.}

{We both know it's in the service of you, Yeerk.}

She didn't answer that. She, and by proxy I, lay sightless and motionless. I thought of my little son, the eleven year-old I'd been torn from who'd grown into a fourteen year-old soldier with a voice so like his father's. I hoped he knew I was alive. I hoped he wasn't burying himself in guilt and regret and fear. I hoped the war wasn't rotting his soul the way it was rotting mine, my corroded mind that couldn't even recognize my own child.

But one can only hope for so long before they start to dwell on the alternatives, so I focused instead on the black canvas of total blindness until I slipped back into the darkness.


	6. Won't Come Undone

**VI: Won't Come Undone**

-/-

-/-

Edriss was watching my memories again. Since her sentencing, she did it pretty frequently, every night before she put my body to sleep, and surely while my mind was asleep. She reminded me of the way Peter had sat in front of the television for two weeks watching old movies after his mother died. To be honest, it bothered me, but not enough to argue with her about it. If she was going to crouch in my head, despondent, absorbing all my happiest memories, I couldn't fight her anyway, and reminiscing was what I'd be doing with or without her.

In another cycle we'd be taken back to Earth for her public execution. When she finally starved to death, I'd be briefly given over to another Yeerk so my mind could be searched for any posthumous charges they could slap on Edriss, and then probably disposed of. My body was already damaged from torture and unhealed injuries, and probably would only get more battered before her death. I would be useless as a host.

Our days were numbered. In a way, it brought out a strange camaraderie between us, one that hadn't existed when she was safe. Yeerks, when facing certain defeat, don't fight it like humans do. After a while, it made all my gloating deeply unsatisfactory. And I didn't want to die either – I was eager to finally be free of her, but some base human instinct in me recoiled at the idea of death. Edriss had explained to me that very few species are capable of the amount of cognitive dissonance that humans manage on a regular basis. I looked eagerly on to the freedom of death, and wanted nothing more than to live, all at once.

So instead of fighting with each other, we lay in the guarded quarters of the Pool Ship that had once been hers, sifting through my memories until we were both nearly delirious.

I held a newborn child in my arms, a boy, with chubby little fingers and a full head of hair. I knew the numbers. 9:27 a.m. Fourteen hours of labor. Thirty-eight weeks of pregnancy, maybe thirty-two being aware of it. Twenty-nine pounds gained, a number I'd fastidiously kept between the recommended twenty-five and thirty-five. Sixteen inches, six and a half pounds, an inconvenient for my job, but not unhealthy, fifteen days early. Peter told me all the numbers first because hard, concrete facts were so much easier for him to process than the fact that he was a father now.

"Which name did you put on the certificate?" I asked him, not taking my eyes off the foreign little thing in my arms. Peter was not the only one having trouble processing the whole thing.

"I went with Marco. You were right, it's not too Anglo-sounding, not too Spanish. And he looks like a Marco. Don't you?" He gently poked the baby's tiny fingers. Our son didn't yet have the motor control, or maybe the interest, to grasp at the intruding digit.

"I don't know if he looks like much yet. A Conehead, maybe. Look at the shape of that little skull."

"It'll get to normal shape soon. And we're not naming our baby Conehead," Peter said laughingly. "I think we'd know if he traveled here from Remulak."

"Oh, believe me, I would know. I think I know exactly where he was coming from for fourteen hours." The baby began to cry. I'd always assumed that parenting would be instinctive, but it was awkward and new, moving the baby's delicate, squished head into position to breastfeed. "I'm sorry, baby. Marco. Your head doesn't look that much like a cone."

I felt the memory distort. Edriss' mind was bleeding into mine. The images of twin newborns, half-Korean, of Hildy Gervais at my side, of my own arms paler and shorter cradling these babies, overlaid my own memory. A little bit out-of-sync, a little bit more faded on top of the memory of Peter and my single baby Marco in my arms.

The images of Peter and Hildy moved together towards the door. In a strange, overlapped voice, they said "your father's in the waiting room. I'll tell him he can come in."

{Edriss, stop trying to pretend it was your family. You have your own memories of them,} I told her.

{Yours are more clear,} she replied.

{This isn't yours. This is my memory.}

{Eva, my memories are fragmented and deteriorating. Yours are as well, but I can access the forgotten sections of them that even you can't. I can dredge up details you never would have remembered without me. Why shouldn't I be able to relive my happiness in the same vivid color and texture as I'm allowing you to relive yours in?}

{Because,} I growled, {it's not your happiness. It's mine. This is my happiness and my love and my family, not your sick murderous excuse for it. Don't even dare compare your idea of love to mine, murderer.}

{Is it so different from yours? Was it different for me to kill Allison Kim and Essam than it was for your brat to try and kill you?}

{Yes,} I said with complete conviction. {Yes, it was different, because Marco was trying to kill you, not me.}

I expected her to argue back more, almost wanted her to so I could tell her a hundred times why she was wrong. But the inevitability of her death had taken the fight out of her. Instead she just flipped over to a memory of my father teaching me to drive.

There had been times when, despite myself, I had admired Edriss' pragmatism and determination, her all-but-delusional confidence. It was difficult to admire her at all when she had completely given up all hope. She was only a memory of her former self, no acerbic insults or vindictiveness left to her, no ambition, no applied cunning. If an opportunity to escape presented itself, she would seize it, but she had no expectation of any chances showing up. All that was left of her were the faded memories she fixed atop the picture-show of my mind.

I almost felt for her for all the months she had spent sharing a head with me, when I was despairing.

She switched over to a memory of my first promotion, when I was in college managing a gas station, going from cashier to assistant manager. I felt the shadow of sympathetic pride and gratification. There was nothing much I could do if she was trying to use my life to remember her own feelings of joy. I didn't feel motivated to futilely try and start a row with her anyway.

{You know,} I said, neither accusing nor empathizing, {there's a certain irony, that you were sentenced to death partially because you were convicted of sympathy, and yet here you are going through my memories because they remind you of you.}

She didn't answer me. A memory of Peter and me at a university-sponsored classical music recital. Extra irony, there. Peter and Marco's escape from infestation had been presented to the Council as evidence that Edriss, empathizing with her human host and already in communication with the Andalite bandits, had orchestrated their protection. Of course, both of us knew it wasn't true, but she couldn't explain that they'd escaped because Marco was an "Andalite bandit" without admitting that she'd kept vital information from the war effort on Earth – which was, like so many Council rules, punishable by some form of painful death. Not that it mattered much anyway; after Edriss had failed spectacularly as a military leader in the Anati system, the Council had been looking for any little reason to reinstate her original sentence.

Last I'd heard, Visser Three was sending out assassins to kill my family. We hadn't heard news beyond that. I would have prayed for their safety, but I had faith that my son was smarter and better equipped than any thugs Visser Three could assign to him.

I slept while Edriss continued to watch my memories. I woke up hours later and found she hadn't stopped all night. I was opening a letter that was awarding me a scholarship; I was taking a bath Peter had prepared for me; I was intimidating an intern from a rival campaign; I was teaching Marco to read; I was excoriating a disliked co-worker; I was shooting some guy down at a bar; I was ten years old and beaming as my mother tasted my first attempt at cooking a whole meal.

Pride, love, power, satisfaction, affection. My life wasn't flashing before my eyes; it was loping along like a disjointed movie for the two of us, the two doomed viewers.

{Edriss,} I said, no longer expecting an answer from her, {in a few days we'll both be dead.}

{Yes.}

{I'll be free.}

{Yes. You will. You'll be free in death, like you always said. Though I don't see what the freedom is in that.}

{It'll be nice, to die on my home planet. To die and be free of you,} I repeated for the thousandth time since her sentencing, but she had made me, too, doubt the freedom of death.


	7. Crawl Home

**Author's Note:** Trigger warning on this chapter for some mentions of sexual violation.

**VII: Crawl Home**

-/-

-/-

I was angry. I was free, but mostly I was angry.

I don't know why I'd thought my life would return to the way it was once I was freed. I'd known it wouldn't, but I was still disappointed when I came back to world that had moved past me and changed without my permission. And I'd thought Edriss' death would be the final key to re-open the door of my life, but even in death she was hanging over me like a lead coat.

The freedom I'd prayed for didn't include a damaged body that barely responded right to my commands, but responded all too viscerally to my fear and sadness. After years of disconnect, suddenly I could barely walk, but my throat could quickly seize up against my will and tears would force their way out, my mind once again overpowered by some other force. And I resented every moment when my mind wasn't in complete control of my body.

More terrifyingly, my mind wasn't in complete control of itself, neither in sleep nor waking. During sleep I was trapped back inside my head with her; during the day, I was bitter and paranoid. I'd always been a bit combative and cynical but never like this. I jumped at small sounds and said harsh things and I hated. I hated like I'd never hated anything. I scared myself with the sheer volume of hate I could contain. I scared myself with how much more I hated Edriss now that she was dead than when she was living in my skull. In my memory I stripped her and her whole race of anything sympathetic and turned them into glowing targets of hatred. The hatred, the all-consuming, feverish, unreasonable hatred fueled me and gave me the energy to continue to use my broken body and mind, and that I had to do that only added to my anger and to my hatred.

Hate. Not loathing, not disgust, but hate. The ugliest word in the English language and its furnace in me stayed so diligently tended.

The hatred hung in my brain like another person. The empty space Edriss had left behind had been filled with rage. It draped itself over everything. It was an intruder, pushing into the space between my body and Peter's.

The intimacy came back first. If Peter and I didn't know each others' minds anymore, we could at least go through the motions. A kiss, a hug, the gentle stroke was always as loving as it had been, and it took the place of the clumsy, stupid words we knew. For so long, words had been my only respite, and now they failed me at every turn. But our bodies, gradually, came back to us. The familiar, private motions that had been unique to us replaced the generic kiss. He traced a heart on the small of my back. I lay my face perpendicularly on his, our noses and cheeks touching, the every exhalation mingling.

But I was rough whenever I stopped focusing on being gentle. One night, when we'd snuck away into the woods and away from the Hork-Bajir for some sexual healing, I ripped up his back.

"Oh God, honey, right there, that feels…ow! Ow! Eva, that's a bit hard!"

"Sorry, sorry!" I broke the embrace immediately, pulling hands away from behind his back. It was too dark to see, but something dripped down one hand. I pushed myself off him. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine." His hand found my shoulder. "Sorry I ruined the mood."

I found the flashlight entangled in my bra and jeans. I flicked it on and flinched at the sight of blood on my fingers. I stumbled around him to see his back. Seven red welts where my fingers had been, and one crimson line where my middle finger had broken the skin. "Oh, God, I didn't realize I was scratching that hard."

He shrugged, pulling on my wrist to bring me back down to the earth. "It's okay. You're getting used to being in control of your body again. Nothing serious."

"I didn't mean to hurt you," I said flatly. I started to put my bra back on.

"Honey, really, it's okay."

I shook my head and put my hair back up. No, not okay. Edriss had only had my body for seven years; I'd had it for over thirty. I knew my own strength. It wasn't my body that was foreign; it was the anger that seeped into every moment of the day, even the private ones. Private, intimate moments that were rife with memories of him having sex with my body while Edriss went through the happy motions and I was trapped unwilling in my own head. Memories of him having sex, with her, unknowing, unaware that he was being violated by her sick mind, that there was another participant in a moment that should have been private.

Victims and perpetrators, both of our bodies. Yes, I knew my own strength.

"Honey, it's really okay. I think I've gotten bug bites out here worse than this."

I let my hands fall to my thighs, sitting cross-legged on the ground half-clothed, and sighed. "You don't have to be understanding. You don't have to think you're so damn understanding."

Peter laughed, never one to back away from one of my challenges. "Think? I know I'm understanding. I'm so understanding our kid turns into a gorilla and asks for help building a space radio, and I say 'sure, is the centaur alien gonna help?'. And then it turns out you're alive and newly freed from extraterrestrial slave-masters and you expect me to think it's weird that you're a little messed up from it?"

"I resent the implication that I'm 'a little messed up'."

Peter looked at me with the same honest eyes I'd lost five years ago. "Yeah? Well, you are."

I lay down in the grass next to him and turned off the flashlight. The stars glittered above us. I reached my hand up as if I could reach them and tear them out of the sky. Peter rubbed my thigh comfortingly.

"I'm not the same person you married, Peter." My voice cracked. I didn't want to admit that I might not ever be that person again. That Edriss had stolen more than my body.

"I'm not either," he said. "Actually…"

"Actually, what?"

He released a heavy sigh and removed his hand from my leg. "You probably wouldn't have married me if you knew what a bad parent I'd be."

"You aren't a bad parent."

He sat up. "Not while you were around, no. But after you, you left…that's why Marco's so self-sufficient. He probably didn't tell you how much of a failure I was."

I didn't say anything to that. If he wanted to confess, I'd let him. I sat up next to him and kept my eyes trained on the sky.

"I mean, I got better," he continued "I got my job back and started actually paying the bills and all. But I just forgot things. And it was two years of me doing nothing but crying and sitting there and sending Marco down through King Street at midnight to get groceries from the Rite-Aid. I was awful. You'd have wanted to kill me."

"I kind of want to kill you now," I said, meaning for it to sound more light-hearted than it did. It's always difficult joking while pointing out someone's deep personal failures. "Flattered as I am that my death meant that much to you."

There really are times when humor is not the best solution. I used to know those times. I used to know when to be kind and understanding to my husband and when to be flippant. But spending years away from someone puts you out of sync. My mood was a bit too biting; his was a bit too ashamed. The humor that was an occasional salve was mud in the wound.

Both wounds, really. I had loved him, loved him still, hoped my death hadn't devastated him, but there was a private hell for me. Guilt over the other wife. Anger, betrayal, paranoia over the other wife. But bringing her up wouldn't do any good. So I didn't.

I didn't know if he wanted me to protest that he hadn't been that bad, but I hadn't been there. I could only take his word. "Maybe it's for the best. He's had to be self-sufficient in this whole thing. Maybe it was all for the best. Maybe it kept him alive."

It came out harsher than I hope, but I could see the silhouette of his head against the sky nod a little. "Yeah, maybe. I'm making an effort, at least. I don't understand most of what's happened in the last month, but I'm doing my best."

"You're doing a wonderful job, may I add."

He wrapped his arm around me. "So are you."

I gave him a smile that was lost in the darkness. "I forgive you, you know. I don't know if that's what you were looking for, but I don't blame you for anything."

He put his face in my hair and took a deep breath. I probably smelled like sweat and river water. "Thanks. I just wish I'd known."

"Focus on knowing now. You're doing a pretty good job at this "being understanding" thing."

"Thanks," he said, drawing me closer. "So we focus on the now."

"Right. Here and now." I was never a touchy-feely emotional baggage type, even before everything. I pulled away. "We need to talk with Toby. Find a way to set up an alternate escape route, if the valley gets attacked."

"That's what you're thinking about?"

"No." I chuckled grimly. "But you don't want to know what I think about these days."

I saw him nod again. "You're angry."

"Aren't you?"

"Of course I am. Just not as angry as you are. I mean, everything that happened to you was out of your control. Everything that happened to me and Marco, maybe I could've done something about that."

"So you're tempering it with self-pity and regret? That's great."

He fell quiet for a moment. It made the night sounds of the forest insufferably loud. Eventually, he said, "you have a right to be angry. I do too, but indirectly. But don't pretend like you're happy being this angry, or that you'd be happier if I was."

I sighed. "This just isn't the time for self-pity, Peter."

"I know. I happen to think I'm doing a pretty good job keeping the self-pity to a minimum. I mean, compared to how I used to be." This time, more tentatively, he just put a hand on mine. "You be patient with me and I'll be patient with you, 'kay?"

"I have an excuse. You've just always been a sad sack," I protested.

"Please. You've had a chip on your shoulder since before I met you. It's just a big honking fissure now."

He started to withdraw his hand, but I took it into mine, even as I sardonically said "oh honey, you're so romantic when you're pointing out my faults."

He laced the fingers of his other hand in the hair behind my ear. "I try my best."

I started to kiss him again, pulling our chests together. His fingers fumbled again with my bra straps. I pressed myself to him, to all the memorized parts of him, the skin and hair and the smooth appendectomy scar and the collarbone.

I still felt the anger and betrayal and harshness beneath my skin, but I felt it contained and dimmed. "I promise not to draw blood this time."

"It's only a scratch," he whispered. "I don't want you worrying about it."

Even with our minds unfamiliar, I could trace the pilgrimage across his familiar body. He could follow the path to the parts of me that never changed, the physical elements that stayed relatively constant. Our bodies knew each other still, thank God.

We had sex in the grass and I crawled a little closer to what I'd had.


	8. Shucked

**VIII: Shucked**

-/-

-/-

My rage ran dry and left me behind, barren. It lay somewhere in the future, pushed away by the what-needed-doing of the present. And I was alright with that, for the while. If we were lucky, there'd be time to hate and cry later; at the moment, there were plenty of reasons to welcome detachment.

Now that I had my body and mobility back, I exercised whenever I wasn't letting Toby pick my brain or trying to coordinate Hork-Bajir. The feeling of using my own will to move my legs and arms was intoxicating, even three months after being freed. I still had a limp and only partial motility in one of my arms, but it was something and it was tangible. Usually, exercising involved a brief jog around the valley, checking up on the defense trenches and booby traps along the way. It was comforting, having responsibility again, after so long of having no say and by necessity leaving it to someone else. I usually walked the final third, since my body could only take so much, having only recently healed.

It was early morning, with enough dew that sleeping in was uncomfortable, but Peter didn't mind. I heard the osprey calling before I saw it land in front of me, then demorph. I reminded myself that the twisted mass of feathers and skin would soon become my son, but it didn't make the morphing process look any more pleasant.

"You're up early."

Once his beak had been replaced by human lips, he said "fell asleep at Ax's last night. I would've called, but you know, the rates on these imaginary cell phones are crazy."

I laughed. I was getting pretty used to him spending the night with Ax and Tobias. I had neither expected nor wanted him to spend every second with me after my rescue.

"Check it out, we figured out how to morph pants!" he said, motioning to his tattered, beaten pair of jeans. "Which would be awesome if I'd remembered to bring something besides bike shorts with me when we moved into the woods. We need to go clothes shopping."

"We'll get on that once we save the human race." It probably would be a good idea, once we weren't wanted refugees of the Yeerk Empire, if that ever happened. The three of us mostly had the clothing Marco had found in various dumpsters behind the mall, and none of that held up all that well to the constant outdoors. The gratitude I felt at freedom would never relent, but that didn't mean that I thought our accommodations were perfect.

We walked for a bit and made small talk about the transponder Peter and the Andalite had set up. Marco was telling me about how he was trying to get the Andalite to reconfigure it to listen in to broadcast sports games. I checked the trigger we had for a rabbit-trap, and he suggested enlisting Tobias is aiding our meat consumption. At some point, my mind wandered off to how beautiful the valley was, and a part of me wondered what Edriss would have thought if she knew the free Hork-Bajir colony had survived her attack.

She would have been shocked and offended at first, at the impudence of someone to dare outsmart her, with thinly-veiled admiration, which would eventually cede to rationalizing away her error. The hypothetical Edriss was so potent I could almost hear her downplaying her mistakes, could almost hear the uncertain tremor in her voice from shaken self-confidence.

"Mom? You okay?"

I snapped back to paying attention the trap I was checking and Marco looking at me, concerned. "Hmm?"

"You looked kind of sad for a second. Is everything okay?" He was very perceptive of my feelings, and very quick to want to console me. It was some perverse reversal, having a child comfort their mother, and while I liked the sentiment it made me feel like a failure.

But I couldn't lie to him and say I didn't have things on my mind, so I took a third option. "It's nothing to do with you, honey."

"Is it Dad?" he asked, looking even more concerned. I had to remind myself that he was still sixteen, and that to him, his parents being happy together was a concern to overshadow all others.

"Your dad and I are fine. Better than fine. It's not that." I added new bait to the trap. "It's nothing important. You wouldn't understand anyway."

"Try me," he said defiantly.

"In court?" I asked, and we exchanged smiles. "Let's get walking again. It's complicated."

"We should head back that way, if you don't mind. It's all rocks this way and I'm barefoot. The healing factor's cool but we never get calluses."

"Sure. That way." For almost a minute we started walking back to the valley in silence, Marco unusually quiet as he waited for me to open up.

"You know, you don't have to talk to me if you don't want to," he eventually said sulkily.

"That's rich for you to say, Mr. Macho. It's just…hard to put into words, I guess."

"I'm listening."

I bit my lip, furrowed my brow a bit, stared at the sun. Maybe it would blind me to the world that always reminded me of how lucky I was to have vision. "It's an adjustment, having someone living with you in your head for years, and then suddenly you wake up every morning and they're not there. No matter how you feel about them."

He nodded, but looked troubled at that. "You don't…miss the Yeerk, do you?"

"No, not at all. It's just, you know, strange. I've spent years with her running commentary. It's like a sitcom where they cut out the laugh-track. You've always hated it but you know something's missing that's usually there. It'll just take me some time."

I stopped and pulled my hair up into a ponytail, trying to organize my thoughts. I didn't want to make it seem like too much of a problem, as obviously the idea bothered him, but since Edriss' death, since the rage had burned itself out, I felt empty. Like a vessel with half the contents spilled out. I suspected – hoped – that more time would ease the feeling. "I hated her, Marco. I was glad to see her die. And I'm glad to be free, and with you and your father. But you don't spend every waking moment with someone and only hate them."

I had been glad to see her die. I'd killed her, hadn't I? It was proof enough of my hatred. Well, not killed her, really, but screamed for her death. I'd known that I'd never truly be free of her while she lived. And yet, somehow, part of me had thought her death would be as artificial as mine had been. It was difficult to believe that her ghost wasn't still living in my head.

"Mmm. Stockholm Syndrome?"

I laughed again. "No, not like that. Where'd you hear that term, anyway?"

"Cassie. She looked it up for Tobias after Taylor Time."

'Taylor Time'. That was the codeword for one of their missions, along with other whimsical names like 'Helmacron Magic School Bus' and 'The Oatmeal Incident'. The longer I stayed, the more synopses of various events I heard. It was simultaneously fascinating and horrifying – fascinating because my child and his friends knew all about races and scientific breakthroughs even the Vissers didn't know about, and horrifying because they had learned it in person, instead of from the safety of a classroom or a history book.

'Taylor Time' was a particularly sobering story to hear about. It had involved setting up Tobias to be captured, and then tortured. I understood the reasoning but it killed me that all five children and the Andalite had concocted the plan and gone through with it.

"Anyway, it's not like that. It's just an adjustment. And it's not like I haven't had some significant life changes in the last month."

"Right," he said nonchalantly, but I could tell from the way he was tugging his hair that he wasn't satisfied with the answer. Evidently, he was as eager as I was to change the topic. "Uh, did Dad talk to you about what I talked to him about last night?"

"Is this a game of telephone?"

"Not really. I just was wondering if I could take your name."

"My name?"

"Your surname. I'd still keep Dad's, but it just seems more fair that way. Especially since you kept it when you got married."

That surprised and touched me. I'd been absent from his life for the last five years, and he still thought I warranted a public display of affiliation. "What does your dad think of all this?"

"I told him the three names thing was the hip thing to do and he went for it."

"Is it the hip thing to do?"

He grinned at me, using the usual humor to mask affection. "Definitely."

"Well, then, who am I to disagree, Mr. Salazar Laroche?"

I was about to tell him that we'd need to sign papers over it when Tobias swooped in. Tobias, besides the Andalite, was probably the Animorph I knew the least about. He seemed rather reluctant to interact with me too much, which Marco suspected was because he was now the only Animorph without a mother, and I reminded him of that fact. I didn't know if that was true or if Tobias was just naturally loathe to spend much time with adults, but he seemed like an intelligent and valuable member, if the most damaged.

Marco waved up at him. "Did you hear I'm Mr. Salazar now?"

If birds could roll their eyes, I'm sure Tobias would have. {Well, don't expect business cards. Actually, I was here to talk to your mom.}

I was pleasantly surprised. While Toby had been using the intelligence I could provide, as time passed my information was increasingly less reliable. It would be nice to feel useful.

Marco made some grumbling comment about chopped liver.

{Ms. Salazar, do you speak Galard? Ax got some new transmissions on the transponder and he can't quite figure out what they're talking about.}

"I don't, but I can probably parse together more phrases than anyone here."

"See, I knew we should have tuned into the Padres game instead. Now we're going to find out about some new mission that'll leave us wetting our pants and cheating death," Marco said darkly, reminding me suddenly of how high the stakes were. I felt a sliver of guilt for being excited to participate, knowing it could put my son on the line.

Tobias stared at me with that serious hawk glare. {Ms. Salazar, it's understandable if you don't want else anything to do with the war. But we could use your help here.}

"Please," I said, acting more casual than I felt as the worry started to twist my guts up, "if anyone here has a chip on their shoulder against these slugs, it's me."

I followed as Tobias led me several miles through the woods to Ax's scoop. All the while, my imagination conjured up horrible hypothetical situations for the Animorphs to be involved in, until the mental images started to fill up the blissful, terrifying hollowness of my mind.


	9. The Intersection of Winning and Losing

**IX: The Intersection of Winning and Losing**

-/-

-/-

It was five a.m., the tail end of a sunrise, and because I liked being awake and in-control of a body that tossed and turned in the night, I'd taken to going to bed late and getting up early. We were staying at a donated summer home from some wealthy philanthropist, well-furnished with an ocean view. It wasn't home – the home I'd remembered had been left behind even before the Pool Ship destroyed our neighborhood – but it was comfortable enough. People had been so eager to reward the kids for saving the world that the places to stay and free food and clothing and cars were pouring in, as if that could ever make the whole thing worthwhile.

I had my mug in my hand, my eyes half-closed and trained on the line between ocean and sky. If I could soak in the sunlight and white leather couch and fluffy white nightgown and cream-filled coffee, perhaps I could purify myself and erase the flat, empty spaces in head. Maybe I could unload all that guilt I'd been carrying around for actions that weren't even my own. Maybe I could just exist in the moment, instead of trapped in a memory of seven years that seemed to just cycle itself into so much longer.

"Can't sleep?"

I turned and saw my son wincing at the sunlight. He was back with us, finally, after three whirlwind weeks of interviews and funerals and meetings with alien ambassadors. I'd assumed he'd sleep for the entire weekend after that type of schedule. Pinching two fingers to the bridge of his nose, he turned away from the window.

"Didn't want to. What, you've never seen a sunrise before?"

"Not willingly, no."

"I like having time to myself. It's a luxury I haven't gotten much of in the last few years." I took a sip of coffee, not letting the company spoil my insistence on enjoying just being. "Hangover wouldn't let you sleep?"

He looked sheepish. I smirked to let him know it was alright. "The easiest way to tell if someone's drunk is if they're trying their best not to look drunk. I don't care and I won't tell your father, don't worry. Just be safe about it."

"Who would've thought they served champagne on American Airlines?"

"There's coffee. It takes the edge off. Come, sit here and relax a bit. It's not as interesting as Letterman but you might like it anyway."

As he rummaged through unfamiliar shelves for a coffee mug and spoon, he called over his shoulder, "they asked me to come back and do Letterman again next month, by the way. Apparently a whole twenty-minute segment of Marco the Magnificent wasn't enough."

"Please don't tell me you introduced yourself like that."

"What, you didn't watch?"

I laughed. "You're not the only one with things to do, squirt. I'm trying to untie all our financials right now. I swear our accountant's suffering a fate worse than death."

He grimaced before finally locating a spoon and sugar. "I'll stick to swapping jokes with Letterman, thanks."

For a moment we just stared at each other, me looking over my shoulder at him standing in the middle of the kitchen, as if we'd just noticed the other person was there. I felt my breath catch in my lungs; I'd nearly lost him so many times, not been there so many times, and the death of the Berenson girl had only made it strike home so much more how lucky I was to have him half-asleep in this borrowed kitchen. Even older, even damaged, I had him. Of all the things we'd both lost, by some blessed chance, unlikely as it was, we were both alive and together and nearly whole.

And then, snapping out of it, I gave him a sly smile. "So how does it feel to have lived out your tombstone by sixteen?"

"Maybe if I'm famous enough and audition for enough bad movies, I'll get remembered as a crappy actor more than anything else. If not, eh, figure I'll kill some Kurt Cobain-type and everyone will forget all about saving the world."

He said it with the usual jokes about death and violence that had come to dominate even our casual conversation, but his jaw set a bit. It was a strange feeling, knowing now that the rest of our lives would always pale in importance to the last few years. We both knew that the invasion had defined us, both to the world and to ourselves, but that didn't mean we liked it. If anything, having no goal made recovering all the more difficult. Having no idea who we were outside the war made putting it behind us quietly impossible.

"Acting, huh?" I said, turning back to the window, trying not to let the listlessness hit.

He shrugged as he sat down on the far end of the couch next to me. "Why not? I'm not going back to high school. I had to fake my death to get out of it."

"No, I suppose you're not." I sighed and took a deep drink of lukewarm coffee. "Your father thinks we should get therapy."

I expected him to look surprised at that, but if he was, no emotion crossed his face. "Do you think we need it?"

I raised my eyebrows and shrugged. I didn't know my own mind enough to know if it was repairable, or even in need of mending. Perhaps Edriss would have been able to tell me.

Marco mimicked my motions perfectly, as confused as I was, so undeniably my son. For several minutes we didn't say anything, just staring out to sea and letting sunspots float lazily over our eyes.

"I'm going to meet those kids today," I finally said.

"So you can say 'hey, sorry your mom was an evil slave-master, here's five bucks for a soda'?" he snorted.

"No," I shot back, but I didn't have a good explanation for what I was going to do or why. I only knew it was something I had to do, or it would eat at me until my dying day. "If you're worried about staying an only child, don't be."

"That's not what I meant," he said bitterly. I understood. I knew fully well that he was most comfortable with me feeling nothing but hatred for Edriss. Anything that could possibly be construed as sympathy would bring up complicated questions. He didn't know what to do with the idea that I had to do right by her children.

Just another two eleven year-olds in a world of six billion people, and I felt some pull to them. "I need to tie up loose ends."

He lowered his eyes from the sky to his coffee. "They're not your loose ends. They're hers."

I wouldn't tell him that her loose ends would be inexorably mine for the rest of my life. "I wasn't asking for your permission or approval. You may be the savior of Earth, but I'm still your mother."

"You are," he said with a level gaze and tone, to remind me that that was all I was allowed to be in his world. Just Eva, his mother and his father's wife, not some strange hybrid of human and alien echoes running off chasing someone else's children.

We switched gears to talk more about talk shows, the house Peter and I were looking at, and Marco's grand machinations to stretch his fifteen minutes of fame into a lifetime, until we ran out of coffee and he went up to bed. It left me a solid hour to myself before I drove into town to meet the kids, which I spent reading the newspaper and sorting through the piles of screened mail an appointed security guard delivered.

Three weeks since the end of the war. Three weeks since the complete lack of responsibility had sent me into a tailspin of furious effort at anything, anything I could possibly do to fill the time. Two weeks of phone calls to foster care agents and social workers who'd done a remarkably good job tracking down two children with unknown surnames. Two weeks of wondering if they were dead, and if I was to be the last testament to Edriss' decent side.

And then a week before, a few more phone calls, information that the twins had been reunited after Darwin had re-entered the system, talking to foster parents and arranging to catch coffee with children who had no say in whether or not they wanted to meet me.

I left early and drove around the block an extra time, finding myself strangely nervous. On the radio, Frank Sinatra sang about flying to the moon, about seeing spring on Jupiter and Mars, and I chuckled at the very idea of space holding anything worth seeing. Rainbows slid across my peripheral vision, a gift of the sunglasses and tinted windshield. Traffic was just beginning to pick up again, people returning to their jobs and doing their best to ignore the two-mile hole where downtown once was.

I was loathe to leave the safety of the car, but I wouldn't spend my life hiding from the public. After enough former Controllers saw through my paltry disguise, I took off my sunglasses and blinked in the daylight, willing my eyes to fix a defiant stare on whomever dared glance sideways at me next. I could hear the muttering, was powerless to stop it, but I tried to put it out of my mind. I didn't want to dwell on the fact that I was the face of so many people's nightmares.

The woman behind the register had obviously been a Controller; she flexed the muscles in her hands and ran her tongue over her teeth and performed all those tiny actions newly-freed people did to remind themselves of their autonomy. I waited for a few moments to see if another employee would take her place, but impatient as always, I surrendered myself to an awkward situation.

"You keep your mouth open like that you'll catch flies, and God knows there's enough of them winging around in here," I told her when she predictably just stared at me. Perhaps she was remembering some horrible thing Edriss had done to her. Perhaps she was just shocked to see my body alive and doing normal human things. I didn't care. When she failed to apologize, I snapped "I guess having a life after Yeerks is a luxury only some of us get to have, isn't it? Now are you going to take my order or not?"

Abashed, the woman averted her eyes and only nodded her head politely when I gave her my order, her voice a mild squeak when she asked for my name and two dollars. I didn't tip.

Coffee. Coffee and a notebook and pens, to give me a way to pass the time, lists of trivial things that needed doing. In the half-hour before the twins and their foster parents arrived, I filled two pages with reminders of papers I needed to sign and people I needed to call.

I recognized the twins instantly, despite having only seen Darwin once and Madra never. Edriss had projected the younger versions of them into my mind at times, after the first trial. They were eleven years old now, Darwin a little taller than Madra, both glancing around warily though their foster parents were at their sides. With a nod and a hot chocolate each from their parents, they crossed the half-empty café to meet me.

I considered standing, but thought it better to stay at their eye level. "Hello, Darwin, Madra."

"Hello," Madra said, a soft smile slipping over her face. Darwin glanced up at me, but didn't smile or meet my eyes. From what I could piece together, Madra had never been infested. Darwin, of course, had been. The last time he'd seen me, Edriss had been pointing a gun at his chest with my arms.

I found myself searching their faces for something I couldn't name. Maybe I was hoping to find kindred spirits in two children touched by the same evil creature I'd been ruined by. Maybe I was just curious to see if I could see any of Edriss in them, as silly as that was, because Edriss was nothing but a slug, her mannerisms nothing but mimicries of human body language. But I looked at the twins, eleven years old, and saw more of Marco than anyone else. He'd been that old when I'd disappeared. In some way, even though he was an adult to me now, he'd stay preserved at eleven in some part of my mind.

But there was no Edriss in these children, and that both relieved and saddened me, somehow.

I decided to be frank with them. "You can call me Eva, if you want. I just felt I should meet you both. You're going to be hearing a lot of things about your mother in the next few months-"

"You mean the Yeerk?" Madra asked. Darwin rolled and unrolled the edge of his napkin.

"Yes. I mean the Yeerk. She…" I drummed my fingers on the table, trying to think of what I was trying to say and how to say it. "She was your mother too, in a way."

"She almost killed me," Darwin said softly.

"She didn't," I said, surprised to find myself advocating for her. "She almost did, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. Good thing, right?"

For some reason, I couldn't bring up that Edriss probably would have, if the Animorphs hadn't intervened. I wanted to convince him, or maybe myself, that the Yeerk who called herself his mother was capable of love. It would justify the things I felt for her that weren't hatred.

Darwin didn't say anything to that, and Madra just looked at me expectantly, so I went on. "Anyway. You're going to be hearing a lot about her over the next few months, and probably a lot about me, and I just wanted to let you know that yes, all those things are true, but she also – she also loved you. As much as a thing like her could know how to love."

"She also killed our real mom," Darwin said coldly. "My Yeerk got told the whole thing."

"We just think of her as the Yeerk. That's all," Madra added. "We try to ignore her when she's in the news."

I bit the inside of my lip. "I just thought you should know. There's no one alive who knew her better than I did, and she did consider herself your parent. She wanted you both back with her. So if you ever change your mind about wanting to know, I'll leave contact information with…those are your foster parents?"

Madra nodded. "Connie and Martin. They're okay."

"She would have been happy to see that you're taken care of. It was one of her last concerns, before she died."

Madra smiled a bit sadly. Darwin pressed his lips together and looked skeptical.

"Anyway," I said, "at some point the media might find you. I won't tell anyone, but there are other former hosts who know about your existence. I've talked to your foster parents and I have a few resources to keep you hidden if they think it's necessary, but hopefully the whole thing blows over."

"We can take care of ourselves, Miss Eva," Madra said, shifting her chair a bit closer to her brother protectively.

"I'm just putting it out there." I sighed and leaned back against the hard metal back of the café chair. "Well, I guess this meeting has been a bit more unsuccessful than we expected it to be."

"Than you expected it to be," Darwin corrected.

"Yes. Than I expected it to be." I covered my disappointment with a sip of coffee. "But I wanted to leave the option open to you. If at any point in the future, you're curious or confused or anything like that, you can reach me. Even if it's in a few years. Like it or not, it's part of your history. I'm just keeping it safe in case you ever want to know about it."

Madra looked sideways at her brother, and then back up at me. "It's not really history we're interested in, Miss Eva."

"Please, just Eva. And I understand. Really. No one understands wanting to forget about the whole thing more than I do."

"Yeah. So we should probably not talk about it, right?"

I nodded in sad understanding. "It's been nice meeting you kids."

Madra looked kindly back at me and nodded. "We'll keep your number just in case." Darwin shot her a look that suggested they had no such plans. I wasn't stupid enough to believe they had any intention of ever revisiting this part of their heritage. The two of them stood and whisked away back to Connie and Martin, leaving a crumpled napkin and their hot chocolates in front of me nearly untouched.

I stayed seated in the café for nearly an hour after that, trying to will myself into getting up and leaving, but trapped within the endless lists to write in my notebook. I wasn't ready to go to the house yet, much as I tried to convince myself otherwise.

There may as well have been a collective sigh of relief from everyone in the café when I did finally leave. I held my anger in check; how could I really blame them for wanting to forget? How could I blame them for not wanting to lay eyes on the former face of their villain? I didn't return to my sunglasses, but was more than a little grateful for the tinted windows. I drove back to the house in silence at first, and then to whatever CD Peter had bought and left in the deck – some rendition of Schubert's "Ave Maria", ironically enough.

It wasn't until I was parked at the edge of the long driveway that I surrendered my body a final time. I let my mind lay back and let physical human reactions take control, and let out choking, gagging sobs and sandpapery tears. I cried for Edriss' orphan children, and for the incalculable wreckage of my life, and of my son's life, and everyone else touched by this hellish invasion. For my new identity I'd had no say in, for my son's nightmares and my husband's grieving, for Nora wherever she was, and for the two-mile hole in the middle of the city.

And to my surprise and horror, I found myself crying for Edriss, the repulsive, wretched little creature that she was, because she was unmourned and complicated. Because for every landslide of greed and cruelty and jealousy, there'd been a kernel of decency in her, and no one was going to stand testament to it besides me. And I neither wanted to nor knew how.

For a long time I sat in the car, parked in the driveway, damning her with every labored breath. Eventually, either Peter saw the car or he was heading out for a walk anyway, and I saw him approach. He probably couldn't see me crying behind the dark windows, but I could see the concerned smile on his face.

Before I wiped my eyes and stepped out of the car, I took one last deep breath, swallowed hard, and fully aware of how much I was deluding myself, willed myself to move on and forget.


	10. Eva Salazar

**Author's Note: **Well, it's done. Thank you to everyone for the feedback on this piece; it's been the most rewarding piece I've written for a variety of reasons.

**X: Eva Salazar**

-/-

-/-

Once the secretary's ushered out the preceding interviewee, she motions for me to enter the reporter's chambers. The interviewer, a young lady who's probably some rising star here at _Time_, looks up from her desk and motions for me to sit. "Good morning, Ms. Laroche."

"You know, I kept my maiden name." I try not to sound snippy at her, but I'm more than a little peeved at her for not doing her research before the interview. It's unprofessional of her, and I assume that she just read Marco's book and took all her information from there.

He'd tell me that I shouldn't even be doing this interview, naturally, because he's more than a little protective of me still. It's all fine for him to go in front of cameras and talk about books and movies for gossip rags, but heaven forbid I go talk about political affairs to a well-respected publication. They might ask me something _upsetting_, something that _triggers memories_. It'd be sweet if it weren't so hypocritical.

"Oh, that's right, Ms. Salazar, I'm so sorry. I made a note of that on my pad but I guess I just missed it," she titters, then moves from her desk to the chair across from me. "Before we started, I just wanted to ask you about how we're titling this piece. We're not decided yet between 'Visser One's Former Host Speaks Out About Yeerk Integration' or 'Visser One's Former _Slave_ Speaks Out About Yeerk Integration'. Of course, we could also go with the celebrity angle and identify you as Marco Salazar Laroche's mother."

"I suppose being identified as an independent individual is out of the question?"

Blank stare.

"Former host is fine."

Her cow-like stare switches instantly back to a peppy smile. "Glad to hear it. It's only going to be about a page of interview material, with maybe another page of your biography and some pictures – Chuck's going to set you up with the photographer for that. Anyway, this should only take about half an hour. Now, let me get my tape running…alright."

She rattles off some identifying article numbers, her name - Louise Gerald - and the date into her recorder before asking, "Ms. Salazar, how has your life changed since the invasion ended?"

"You mean, besides freedom and a son who can buy me a beachfront house? It's a lot of paperwork to come back from the dead."

She looks at me expectantly, as if expecting me to continue. I sigh.

"I don't think, besides those things, that my life has changed too much more than the average person's. We've all seen a huge change from the way things were in 1998. Obviously we'd be smart to expect an economic boom from all the shared technology, even if it's being bottled-necked by exclusivity contracts right now. But mostly, the open conversation between different sentient species is going to bring forth a variety of expanding industries, including intergalactic relations, extraterrestrial housing placement and education, and intergalactic law. The way we teach science will change entirely. And that's not to mention the personal questions brought up by the whole thing, especially regarding former Controllers and religion."

"Do you think the discovery of alien races stands in opposition to religion?"

"Well, I can only speak from the Christian perspective. But I don't think it dismantles religion in any way, but it definitely…it definitely requires some extra examination, to stay devout and informed. We know that the Arn genetically engineered an entire sentient race, which throws a wrench into things. And really, God and aliens were never exactly contradictory, but it brings a lot of questions up about what humankind's place is in the universe, if we're not there to rule dominion over everyone." I pause for a second, realizing I'm straying away from the talking points I wanted to hit. "Actually, the dominion thing is a bit of a Yeerkish sentiment."

Writing notes furiously, she asks, "what are your opinions about the movements to integrate?"

"Integration's the key to all this. But it has to be done carefully. It's no secret that people in general aren't too keen on foreigners, especially foreign invaders. At the same time, the Yeerks have their own culture and laws. The _nothlits_ will have to abide by human laws, which is going to be a pretty big shift for them, especially the ones who never had hosts before. We'll need to exercise patience and restraint while they adjust, and mutual respect. The last thing we need is apartheid, or genocide, between the two races, which is a very likely possibility. I mean, there's already violence against former Controllers, even the involuntary ones, which is a step removed from the Yeerks themselves."

"Have you witnessed any of this violence personally?"

"I was assaulted once by a former Controller who recognized me as Visser One's host, yes. Thankfully no one suffered any serious injury."

"So can I take it that you support the Berkin Bill that would protect Yeerk _nothlits_ from violent crime under hate crime statutes?"

"Only if it's temporary. Hate crime legislation is a band-aid solution, and it's inherently unfair, but if it discourages violence long enough for the two species to reach an uneasy peace, then it's useful as a short-term tool. What we really need to focus on is education and monitoring of our police forces and judicial systems that protect _nothlit_ communities. We need to hold our enforcement services to their jobs and to our laws, which do protect _nothlits_."

Louise taps her pen against her notepad, then looks thoughtfully at me. "You know, Ms. Salazar, it's surprising that you're so sympathetic to the Yeerks after your experiences with them."

"I'm no sympathizer; I'm just expedient. A peaceful solution is much better than continuing war. And more than that, Yeerks are individuals. We don't, or at least we shouldn't, hate Cubans because we don't like what Castro does. The same thing applies here. Yeerk culture is different than ours, but, ah, not all Yeerks are the egomaniacal invaders and war criminals that made our first impressions."

"And yet, your Yeerk was the leader and instigator of the war on Earth. It's just surprising that you've managed to be so forgiving. How did Visser One affect your view of Yeerks?"

I bite my lip, thinking of the right words. I don't want to talk about Edriss. I've spent the last three years dragging my battered life away from what Edriss did to it. Filling that paper-thin hole in my head with work and prayer and selective memory. Pressing against the barriers of everyone's expectations of the tormented survivor, against the circumstances that tried to craft the rest of my years. And all everyone ever wants to talk about is Edriss, who's dead when I'm alive.

"Ms. Salazar?"

"I didn't hate Edriss because she was a Yeerk. I hated her because, as an individual, she didn't even have the most basic concept of morality, and she personally hurt my family. But she isn't representative of all Yeerks, and more that that, you don't spend seven years with someone in your head without learning a bit about where they came from." I absentmindedly unbutton my jacket.

Louise just looks at me expectantly, so I go on.

"Um, I don't really want to call it a 'relationship', because that makes it sound like we liked each other, but I understood her. She was a politician, that's all. A really ruthless, amoral, self-interested politician. And since I was in her head and immersed in Yeerk military culture, I saw how a lot of her personality was just harmful traits built on a really innocuous base. I mean, pride, ambition, hard work, cunning, they're all things we value. It's only really a problem when you add an immoral personality and, and a military system that encourages it. And their military system is repulsive. There's nothing from there that should be allowed to continue. But not all Yeerks are soldiers."

Louise almost looks disappointed. I wonder if she wanted to write a scathing article about the trauma of Yeerk control, but there are thousands of former Controllers out there willing to spew useless hatred. I don't want to add to the problem, even if I don't associate with former Yeerks myself, and the world doesn't need to see another bleating victim in the limelight. "That's very diplomatic of you," she says.

"Bachelor's in communications and master's in political science. Diplomacy is my bread and butter. Off the record, though? I dislike Andalites more than I dislike Yeerks."

"One last question, and this has to do with the Animorphs – how do you respond to the criticism that the surviving Animorphs should put more effort into doing good, like Cassandra Valentine has done?"

It's not a question I want to answer. I can feel my jaw clenching. "I think people who say those things don't have a clue what they're talking about. Miss Valentine is a wonderful person and I'm proud of her, but the Animorphs don't owe the world a debt because they're famous now. They sacrificed their childhoods and emotional wellbeing to protect everyone here. If anything, the world owes them, and if Mr. Harper wants to hide in a tree or my son wants to spend his time making people laugh for money, then I defy someone to think of a good reason why they shouldn't. And then they can show me their tax returns, and they better've donated every red cent to Oxfam."

Louise smiles. "Thank you for the interview, Ms. Salazar. It's been a pleasure and an honor. I hope I didn't keep you too late."

"Not at all. I have a date, though, so I have to run. Could you have Chuck call my office?"

"Sure. A date?" Her eyes light up, hopeful for another scandalous twist to add to the piece. "I thought you and Mr. Laroche were still happily married?"

"We are. I'm meeting him and my son at some upscale French restaurant. I promised Marco I'd go with him if he didn't give me any mouth about doing interviews." I don't add that we'll be spending the rest of the day sailing, and probably be making all sorts of macabre jokes about drowning. Personally, I've come to relish spitting in trauma's face.

"Ah," Louise deflates a bit. As a campaign manager I used to deal with reporters all the time, but they'd always be asking about my client; as a war survivor and advisor to the US Department of Extraterrestrial Affairs, they're always asking about me, me and Edriss, and I like that a lot less. "Well, have a nice day."

"You too, Ms. Gerald." And re-buttoning my blazer, I leave.


End file.
